earthquakes or volcanoes in the Hawaiian Islands took hours to reach very distant shores…where they inflicted their worst damage.”
“If you want to know about tsunamis, ask my oh-so-clever husband,” laughed Shakira. “He knows everything. Or thinks he does.”
“Unlike you two, I have been given expert tuition, instruction, and knowledge from a great master,” said Ravi. “Professor Paul Landon, the world’s leading authority on volcanoes, earthquakes, and tidal waves, took me under his wing for a few days,” said the General. “Brought my knowledge right up to scratch.”
“Excellent,” said Admiral Badr. “Not too long now.”
They ran on past Kodiak, crossed the sea-lanes leading up to the Cook Inlet and to the port of Anchorage. A day later, they were creeping through 1,200 fathoms of water south of Prince William Sound, 500 feet below the surface.
Following the big sweep of the Gulf, they changed course there, making a gradual turn to the southeast, staying in the Alaska Current, outside the 200-meter line, tiptoeing warily past the Yakutat Roads, on down to the Dixon Entrance, north of Graham Island. These were waters where both senior Commanders had worked before.
The sheltered, noisy expanse of the Hecate Strait looked tempting, lying as it did between the 160-mile-long Graham Island and the Canadian mainland. But the depths were treacherous. Right here the ocean runs hard south past the great archipelago of islands — hundreds of them — on the rough, violent coast where the Rocky Mountains sweep down to the sea. It’s noisy, it’s damn near paradise, except for the outstanding opportunities to rip the hull wide open in 30 feet of granite-bottomed seabed.
“Outside the island, I’m afraid,” said Ben Badr. “It’s deep, and according to Shakira, almost certainly shuddering with SOSUS wires. It’s our usual story — very slow, very careful, right down 800 miles of Canadian coastline, past the Queen Charlotte Islands, past Vancouver Island, then past the great American state of Washington. Should reach our op area on August 6. Then it’s more or less up to Shakira.”
And no one knew that better than the beautiful Lieutenant Commander, who worked tirelessly at her desk in the navigation room. Occasionally, Admiral Badr took the
They were in the risk-reduction business, and their modus operandi did not include providing the slightest glimmer of information, even on Chinese military satellites, to sharp-eyed Fort Meade detectives like Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe. Ravi and Ben wouldn’t know Jimmy’s favorite exclamation—
This somewhat esoteric description had evolved from the more usual phrase of “casting a chink of light” on a problem, and George Morris had found Ramshawe’s linguistic ingenuity so amusing that he spread it all over the eighth floor of OPS-2B. For most people, it contained a touch more panache than a mere “chink of light,” the same kind of espionage flourish as
Ravi and Ben were not willing to give one thin amp of credibility to the Shanghai Electrician. They accessed the satellite only every four or even five days, averaging 24 seconds of mast exposure per twenty-four hours. They stayed deep and slow, all the way along their southern voyage, past the Canadian coastline. They slipped down to 600-foot depth as they crossed the unseen frontier, west of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, into North American waters off the coast of Washington State.
Out where the
Shakira’s view was to stay well clear of the vast seascape that washes onto the shores of Washington State. She regarded it as the most dangerous part of their long journey, a place where there might well be U.S. submarine patrols, and many more highly sensitive surface warships, all carrying state-of-the-art detection and surveillance ASW equipment.
In her opinion, they should stay deep until they were well south of the fast and lethal predators from the Bremerton and Everett U.S. Navy Bases. Those predators would show not the slightest mercy to an intruder, especially an unannounced Russian-built nuclear they had been puzzling over for several weeks. And there was no doubt, certainly in the mind of General Rashood, that the Americans were most definitely wondering about them.
Admiral Badr kept in touch with Shakira’s heavily marked charts all the way, unfailingly agreeing with her and her sense of caution. They moved on slowly, the big, lightly used reactor running steadily, all systems operating flawlessly throughout the submarine. Ravi and Shakira would have liked a bigger cabin, but there was no chance of that. They worked and slept exhausted, welded together by the fire of love and revenge upon the Great Satan and its Israeli devils.
They crossed the 48th parallel, which bisects the northern timberland of Washington State, then the 47th, which took half a day. On August 5, they were due west of the estuary of the mighty Columbia River, the great 1,200-mile-long waterway that rises in a snow-and rain-filled torrent in the mountains of British Columbia, surges south, and then swerves west to form much of the border between Washington State and Oregon.
The Columbia was the most powerful river in the United States, generating one third of all the hydroelectric energy in the entire country. The Chief Joseph, the Grand Coulee, the John Day, and the Bonneville were the biggest of eleven massive mainstream dams. And the names of the latter two had been marked carefully on Shakira’s charts and circled in red, her personal code for potential danger.
In Shakira’s view, these two hydro giants, set upstream from Oregon’s commercial hub of Portland, would be heavily protected from terrorist attack, and the chances of high radar sweeping the skies above the dam were excellent. What Shakira wished to avoid especially was a missile detection from U.S. radar defenses, mainly because she considered that to be an unnecessary hazard, and most certainly avoidable.
The preprogrammed data inside the computer of the Scimitar SL-Mark 1s (plain TNT,
But the entire project made her nervous, and she found it difficult to sleep, often pacing the navigation room at all hours of the night, pulling up the charts of coastal Oregon on the screens of the satellite navigation computers.
Ravi too understood the scale of the project they were undertaking, but he was consumed with the minutiae of the target area. He combed through the notes provided by the late Professor Landon and longed each day for the luxury of a satellite communication that would detail the ever-changing situation among the high volcanoes within the mountain ranges of America’s vast northwestern coastal states.
He had pages of data on Mount St. Helens, the Fuji of the United States, which was almost identical in its symmetrical shape to the legendary Japanese volcano. At least it was before it finally blew with stupendous force on May 18, 1980, sending a shudder across the entire southwestern corner of the state of Washington, and literally shot a tremor straight through the gigantic Cascade Mountains.
The blast flattened fully grown Douglas fir trees up to 14 miles away from the volcano, and obliterated 400 square miles of prime forest. Fifty-seven people died. Raging mudflows thundered into the rivers. Volcanic ash showered from the darkened skies all the way to Montana, 650 miles to the east.
The colossal eruption blew the entire snowcapped glory of the summit clean away from one of the most spectacular mountain peaks in the United States. Before May 18, Mount St. Helens rose thousands of feet above every hill and mountain that surrounded it, dominating the landscape. It stood, serenely peaceful, 9,677 feet high. After the blast, it stood less proudly, at only 8,364 feet. Its great shining white crest was entirely missing, like a spent fire-work.
A broad, tilted circular crater more than two miles across was embedded into the pinnacle of the mountain. From its lower edge, carved into the north side, the crater’s rim was cut into a giant
